


like man new-made

by marketchippie



Category: Winter of Ice and Iron - Rachel Neumeier
Genre: F/M, Light Bondage, Light Sadism, M/M, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Threesome - F/M/M, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-16 08:25:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14807807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marketchippie/pseuds/marketchippie
Summary: A fire in winter is a glimpse of life at its purest, a promise of warmth and life in the dark months. Yet it burns no less keenly, no less hungrily in the cold.Though a winter kingdom, Eänetaì’s renowned cruelty is that of flame: a suffocating, choking devastation, a rapacious and hungry thing.Eöté finds what she expects in the Eänetén palace. In the Eänetén duke.





	like man new-made

**Author's Note:**

> The names and accents are not my fault. That's on Rachel Neumeier.

**** Eöté is born small and sickly in Tisain, bloodless and blue-lipped. Her lips turn rosy but her size never matches what it is meant to be; for all that, her skin fits her bones too tight, she thinks. Her body is nervous, feels too acutely, bruises too easily. And the world around her always, always presses too close.

Fourteen, she left home to serve, and to serve she was asked, and then not asked. In Tisain, in the home of her ladyship, she had been passed hand to hand at the lady’s finest dinner parties, the last of many tasting courses for discerning guests.

In Tisain the suffocation she felt when she closed her eyes, when she let the world move over her, had simply been evidence of mastery.

In Eänetaì, she closes her eyes and tastes smoke. When she cannot breathe, she recognizes the press as divinity. 

 

 

The Wolf Duke of Eänetaì stalks from room to room in the palace. Within him burns the Immanent Power of Eänetaì, the force that warms the land beneath the snows, the beast that craves the blood he spills on snow. Or so she hears. And so she knows. She has never seen him spill blood, but she passes him and feels what he feels. Awareness of her skin. _Craving_.

His eyes burn yellow, alight in the dark.

 

 

The Wolf Duke of Eänetaì saves her from another harsh master.  And so it is that she has come to sleep in the room beside his; so it is that the palace whispers she sleeps in his bed. That  she carries his child. He put the whispers in his mouth.

She thinks, sometimes, of the way he looked at her when he found her, naked and whipped. The moment before he did her the kindness, when it seemed kindness was the very last thing in his heart.

 

 

 

 

The night he saves her, she sheds her clothes and looks into her glass, running a hand over the intact flesh, avoiding the ruined.

This body that owns her is a trembling thing, a stifled, terrified beast of prey. She digs her nails into the lash-marks and hisses like the candle hisses when blown out. A tongue of flame licks under her skin, violent and wilful. Lord Laören did not think of her when he acted. He looked at her and saw something pretty, something that belonged to the Duke. He did not hit hard enough to draw blood. But the skin is red, thin. She digs in her nails until it turns white again.

Then, only then, does she think of the Duke. Who is something else. No petty master.

The pleasure that follows her hand is a terrible, choking thing. She cries out only once, then thinks she hears motion outside—a soft step in the dark, the pad of a wolf. And she is very, very still.

 

 

The candle on her bedside burns to a stub, but she cannot sleep when she hears steps outside of her room. No room has ever been her own before, never inviolate. Nor this one. Nor can it be, when she is alert to the duke, in the other room, awake. To the cold in her bones against the heat in him suffusing the room: his rages, stoked by his unwillingness to accede to them. To the thinness of the door between them, the terrifying invitation on the other side.

A fire enclosed in wood will not burn itself out. It will burn its way out of the box and take the world with it.

The candle is not out.

Eöté rises, wakeful, her nerves alert. A pursued creature can never rest. She cannot remember sleeping through the night since her earliest days in her lady’s court in Tisain—until she realized that nights never truly end, that each day chases the next, senseless with the same hungers. The nights are long in the Pohorin winters, longest in the Iron Hinge months.

Eöté has not slept for a very long time.

Rising, she carries the candle to the door’s end and listens until the footsteps stop. Careful of the flame, she sits, tucking her knees to her chest. Looking into the flame, the slick of wax on the plate.

Steady and sure, she places her palm over the flame, until the heat brushes her skin. She sighs once, keenly, and closes her eyes. This, she understands. Of this, she is not afraid.

Closer, until it bites skin.

She makes a sound—a startled sigh, like a prayer of relief—it is enough.

The wind in the window is mountain-rough and subject to the whims of the Immanent Power. The door gusts sharply open, though the wind is not biting cold as it is outside. It is the Power that enters the room before the duke.

Then, _then_ the duke.

It is not cold that freezes her. She is utterly still where she is.

“I heard—” His steps are quick and light. He stops “You have burnt yourself. I will send for someone.” A quick careful evaluation in his eyes. “For Reiöft.”

Yes, she trusts the king’s lover, or in any case has told him this and that of herself because he is easy to talk to, if that is trust—she thinks not. No, she does not tremble when Caèr Reiöft enters the room. The air does not change around him.

She shakes her head mutely. The duke raises an eyebrow, dissatisfied, needing more from her.

“No need,” she manages, in a whisper.

Most men—and plenty of women, too—are simply monsters of the flesh. She understands the threat they present, that they enact. There is nothing they can do to her that is beyond the bounds of her imagination. Rarely is it beyond the bounds of her memory.

Now, as the duke stands, unmoving in his regard, the Immanent Power of Eänetaì curls into every corner of her room. It warms the air, not comfortingly, as though the room might ignite around them, as though floor and wall is banked with flame. It touches her skin, as the air must, through her gown, and she feels as though the duke has pulled up her skirts.

Her fingers twitch above the flame, just shy of begging for a second kiss. It does not escape the duke’s notice.

“You did this to yourself,” he says, and steps inside.

His step is swift; at once, he is beside her, over her, and his hand is on hers and his body is—everywhere—she has bound herself up so small but he catches her hand and can prise her fingers open with one gloved thumb. When he opens them, a shudder moves through her body, and she sees that same shudder echo in him. Feels it like a ripple in the room.

He says, “Explain.”

Power—any power, not even simply Immanence—begs truth. Or perhaps she has simply never been brave or clever enough to lie. She says, “I am not afraid of this.”

“You are in my protection,” the duke says. “I will not see—misuse, of the bodies in my custody.”

“They will think you have done worse.”

The pain has made her brave, she thinks, or then, the pain has made her stupid. His severe features catches the shadows of the room in their hollows, their many sharp edges. “What will they think I have done?”

She whispers: “Don’t make me tell you.”

She knows what the Immanent Power asks of him. They all do. Nothing is beyond her imagination.

Blood on the snow. Lashes in a man’s back. Men go missing in Pohorir, the sort of man that goes unmissed. The duke’s lusts in the bodies of men and of women. The Immanent Power’s lusts, irrespective.

The same Immanent that presses her breathless now, a smother of magic as the duke holds her by the wrist.

He abruptly drops it, but the Power only heats. He turns his face again and she feels the heat of the room on her cheeks. “You are in my protection,” he says again, and she thinks of his face when he caught Lord Laören in the throes of his savagery, when he took it upon himself to institute that protection. He might have killed. He might have taken the whip for himself. Yet he did not.

She opens her hand and returns her fingertips to the edge of the candle.

The hot knife of the burn would be a relief—from fear, and from the poisoned coil of desire.

“Do not,” the duke says, cold as the air outside.

She does as bidden. Or does not do. Trembling and still, she casts a look at him from beneath her lashes.

Set deep in his face, the banked embers of his yellow eyes are ready to ignite. How free might she be, consumed utterly by such flame.

“You might do it,” she says. “Not burning—I mean—my lord, you might do as you wished.”

A twitch, in the hollow cheek. He turns from her. It takes him an undue amount of time. His steps are very precise: one, two, towards the door.

“I will not break those in my custody.”

“I have not broken yet,” she says, very quietly.

He stops.

“Remove your dress,” says the Wolf Duke of Pohorir, with a kind of cold anger.

When she does, the candlelight catches the slick shine on her thighs, and one, two, the duke is close enough to touch. His hands are hot on her body, the way she had imagined they would be. A confused winter heat that is everywhere under his clothes. Like touching ice until your hands go numb, she thinks.

“You will admit when you are past your limits,” says the duke to her. It is the last thing he says.

But she was never taught that there was any such place, and he does not find it, as he lays her on the bed, as he bids her wait as he sheds his garments, never turning from her. Not even an Immanent Power can colonize a land that does not exist. He is beautiful beneath his clothes. She had expected as much.

She reaches out to touch his back when he is in her and feels the lash-marks there, like her own history drawn on a canvas of someone else’s flesh. When she lays fingers to the scars he shudders and shakes off her hand. Do not touch him, he bids her. Give herself over.

And—for the scars on his back and the burn on the palm of her hand—she does, entirely. That feeling that she cannot breathe in Pohorir makes a swift sense, at last, as though she has been waiting since she entered the palace to feel the duke’s hand around her throat.

The edges of her vision go black, but the pinpoint shocks of light she sees must be Eänetaìsarè. The lights remain. Consciousness remains. His eyes are luminous and far from human, given over to animal and god. Dizzy, exquisite with it, her mouth tasting of iron, she looks up into his eyes and breaks herself on a divine wheel.

When he drives into her, perfect and ruthless, she weeps. In gratitude, she weeps.

 

 

In the morning, her voice is gone and her nipples are bruised to the touch, the flesh of her thighs so tender that a single step sends her nerves riot. Yet she has slept—and well past the first alarm, shirked the first and least of her duties. The Duke’s court asks so very little of her: the protected pet, untouchable.

She does not trust _untouchable_ , which has only ever meant that a threat was coming, unwelcome and unseen. Not like she trusts pain. Pain is honest; perhaps the only honest thing. Choosing pain the only true choice.

When she makes her way to the common hall, she sees that she has not been missed. The Duke turns his face from her, a muscle ticking in his jaw.

At night, she is left alone to listen for the step of footsteps: to doubt but not to fear.

The Wolf Duke does not return to her bed.

 

 

The Duke’s captain looks at her too long, with an unusual kind of overfamiliarity. He, too, has known pain: she listens, and she knows the signs. Hears that Lord Laören chose him when there was no Wolf Duke to burst through the door.

Who does not burn, but who might salve.

The Immanent Power burns so hot through the walls she can feel it scorching through the core of her. In her sleep, fire licks the soft pads of her feet and the starved hollow of her belly. Sometimes, when she wakes, she tastes it like smoke in the back of her throat.

One night, she kisses Captain Deconniy, hoping for water instead of fire. His mouth opens beneath her. _Oh,_ he says, hands fluttering for purchase somewhere that will not presume too much of her body, and for a moment she is intact and clean.

 

 

The pleasure of Captain Deconniy’s company is new and strange, sincere and salvaging in a way she had not supposed possible in the meeting of the flesh. His eyes are always locked on hers; she finds it difficult to look away and almost impossible to go away inside herself. But nor can she leave herself behind. He moves in her—beneath her, when she realizes it is easier to teach him like this, that he needs and even wants teaching—with his hands locked on her hips, watchful and astonished. If she had an intact heart, it would be his. Of course it would.

Yet there is something missing. Even now, she knows that when she lies back, her surrender betokens something greater than the flesh.

This, she cannot explain to him. They communicate best when they are not tied to their words, but when she tries to guide his hands—his nails—his teeth—he is inclined to sheath his claw. _I will never hurt you_ , he murmurs into the space between her breasts. _Never, never_.

She knows. Immanent Power save her, she knows.

She does not like to think of the Immanent Power by name— _Eänetaìsarè_ —lest it listen, lest it be called. This is superstition alone. The Power has never stopped knowing her, wanting her. More than anything, the Power knows what to expect of her. She is tinder; it is her inexorable fate to be sought by the flame.

She had not considered the Captain’s flammability. For a brief moment, she had forgotten what a peril she has always been to stand beside.

More than that. Closer, still. She has hardly had the chance to make the choice of her company before: she does not think of collateral damage.

 

 

For a moment, when the Wolf Duke sees them, she sees the man and not the Power. His features open, rather than close, and the man behind them is startled and stricken.

Deconniy is up and running at once, feet on the floor, a hand to cup himself to the barest decency and the other outreached and grasping. Typically the Duke would outmaneuver him, but the Duke has his wound to contend with—the wound Deconniy made—and he flinches, halting his step just long enough that Deconniy can reach him. The sound of his knees, when they hit the floor, is audible and painful: the cost of servitude. “I did not mean to transgress upon your hospitality,” he says. “Please.”

The room is suffused with Eänetaìsarè, the Wolf Duke’s eyes bright yellow in the dim room. The Immanent Power is hungry, bright in the face of Deconniy’s debasement. His shoulders hunch, slightly, as if awaiting a lash. It does not come; it will not come.

She is left behind, damp and open on the bed. Not forgotten. The Duke’s eyes flick up to her, and she recognizes the conflict in him, the tension between man and Power and the tension that belongs solely to him. It is Eänetaìsarè that heats the room, but it is the man, Innisth terè Maèr Eänetaì, that swallows.

Pity is tinder, not balm, to the Power, but it is not pity that moves her.

“Please,” she says softly, echoing Deconniy. Deconniy, who loves the Duke more than any—more than she does, certainly. And, though he would not know it, more than he does her. It will be a mercy, she thinks.

“Stand up,” says the Duke, roughly. “Hands by your side, Captain.”

For just a moment she doubts herself. Then she watches the Deconniy’s cock, shining and still half-hard, bare. He stands with his hands back, shoulders tense and chest high, a perfectly made form for the breaking.

“You do not touch what is mine,” says the Duke, and the wolf’s-eyes are on her, but his hand reaches out to brush down the bare sweat-slicked surface of Deconniy’s chest, down to land lightly against the tip of Deconniy’s cock. The Duke takes his time. The breath Deconniy takes is high and sharp and sends a tremor through the room, like a whisper over candleflame. “This is mine.”

The Duke’s gait is heavy, limping, but he carries himself with the same fierce grace; he is wearing only his nightshirt but it may as well be armor. Eänetaìsarè begs for humiliation, for pain, and Eöté’s bare skin prickles with awareness on the bed. By the time the Duke makes his way to the bed, the room is a furnace and Eöté is half-melted within.

“Watch,” says the Duke. “You don’t understand what you’ve put your hands on, do you?” He looks thoughtful, for a moment, his austere face set in pristine judgment, except that he is vulnerable beneath his nightshirt, the thin fall of fine linen hardly hiding his desire.

“Don’t hurt her,” Deconniy whispers, and it is Eöté who then says, in a voice torn from deep in her belly, “Verè, _be quiet_.”

“For that, Captain—” The Duke pauses. “Bring me your belt.”

Deconniy starts, then takes a careful step.

“On your knees,” amends the Duke, and the slow fall of Deconniy’s body, the brace of his palms to the floor, the tension in his forearms and the grief in the fall of his head, makes Eöté believe in fortune. How very, very beautiful he is, like this, pulling the belt from his discarded garments, pulling it tight around his whitened knuckles. She might love him now: she sees what the Duke must see—has seen; will see—in her at her most abject.

“I beg of your grace,” says Deconniy, kneeling at the Duke’s feet, offering the belt with downcast eyes. “Forgiveness, undeserved, clemency for her only—”

“Every word you say will be etched on her flesh,” says the Wolf Duke of Pohorir, earning every whisper of terror that follows his name, and only Eöté hears the promise inherent for her.

“Speak, then, Verè,” she says, softly. “Plead for me.”

The Duke’s hand on her mouth, the same light touch. The taste of commingled sweat on his fingertips. Her lips part, tongue rising beneath his fingertips; she hears Deconniy’s shocked inhale. “You will be silent.”

She nods, and his hand slips down, fingers pressing idly at the tremor in her throat until her vision is luminous and smoky at the edges. The Duke’s face swims in her vision, then sings back into clarity when he removes his hand.

Nothing else has ever made the world so bright and clear.

Deconniy is silent. The Duke takes Deconniy’s belt—its buckle his seal—and wraps it around her wrists. Astonishing, that her skin can prickle and freeze in a room this hot, as though thrown to the wilds of Pohorir—though nothing is wilder than this. He pulls up, wraps the belt around the bedstand, her arms tighten above her head. A soft sound escapes her. Her body rises, plaintive, and the belt jars.

For a moment, she is in Lord Laören’s ropes again, tied and lashed and humiliated, and then the soft familiar heat of Eänetaìsarè curls around her ankles like smoke and reminds her that this is something altogether different. Even Deconniy’s soft touches were more kin to that. This is a path out of her body, to escape. To be chosen by a Power is to become part of that Power, to become near to a God. Whether Fortunate or Unfortunate, she cannot say.

The Immanent heat moves, ephemeral and all-consuming, over her. The Duke looking down at her with infinite remove as he sheds his nightshirt and stands apart from her, perfect, as if carved out of ice.

“Captain,” he says. “Do I have your attention?”

Tears shine on Deconniy’s cheeks. As he looks up, the expression on his face is one of despair and love: the Duke fills his vision.

“My lord, always. And I would take your—absolutions, instead.”

“I know what you want,” the Duke replies, calm. “To learn how much you can bear. You will.”

As tasked, Captain Verè Deconniy kneels at attention, perfectly still and undeviating from his soldier’s posture. As she had asked, he begs. She never begs. She stopped begging long ago; she has only just now begun to receive.

It is Deconniy’s task to learn his limits, not hers. She knows how much she can bear. More. The Duke’s nails dig into her nipple; they might be claws. Then his teeth. She has a vivid dream of him tearing her open, a wolf in name and truth, of splitting her to the center and letting the Power consume her heart. He does not have to prompt her to open her legs. She is slick to the touch and shaking when he touches her.

“You’re hurting her,” says Deconniy, but weakly. The Duke lifts an eyebrow.

“Am I?”

The suffocating force of the Power seems to pin her in place, flame on her lips and wrists and hips, as he steps back from her. He touches kneeling Deconniy’s face, leaving a shining trail on Deconniy’s cheek. His lips.

Helpless, Deconniy turns his face toward the Duke’s hand, kissing his palm. A sacrament. Permission, given unasked. Not for her.

The Duke slaps him clean across the flush mouth; he whimpers. “Forgive me,” he says, and for a brief and terrible minute he moves forward. His hands to the Duke’s foot, the wounded leg—his forehead pressed to the wound he made, then his lips. The mark he leaves behind, printed of her.

“ _Back_ ,” says the Duke, voice ragged. For just a moment, more man than Power. “At attention, Captain, damn it.”

“Forgive me,” says Deconniy again, and when the Duke turns back, his gaze flickers to her. She would not be seen by him, she thinks. Not like this. The knowledge is dangerous. She fears the sight of her in the Immanent Power’s grip will burn him.

“Do not move, Captain,” the Duke says, cold and not looking back. “But you may have the use of your hands.”

She looks, sees his hand on his cock, his eyes shut tight, face constricting in a war of wills, but his beautiful lips open and half-praying. “Forgive me,” he says, again and again, each stroke a gasp of relief.

And the Duke has returned to her and his eyes are reassuringly inhuman, yellow and aglow. He cups her from below, fingers uncurling into the slick heat of her. Body desperate for use, she arches up into him, but he will not look, even as the Immanent Power suffuses her skin. His hands, in its service, are a merciless relief. His eyes are elsewhere: on Deconniy’s face, flushed and wet, rhapsodic.

“I forgive you,” says Eöté, her body suffused with a flush, fierce love. For the Duke, for Deconniy, for the land itself. And Deconniy comes, shuddering, into his hand.

The Duke’s shoulders tense. “I do not ask it,” he says, and even as his hand is between her legs the other makes its way back to her throat. And she is a moment behind Deconniy, shattering into the stars at the edges of her vision. 

The Duke’s hands leaves her: the one, then the other. A gesture, to Deconniy, who is far from able to walk. After a moment, he arrives bedside on his knees. The rough scrape of his body on the stone thrums in her body. “My lord,” he gasps softly, throat hoarse, face by the Duke’s thigh. Not discouraged, he presses his cheek in, like a homecoming. Lips to the wound again.

She does not crave his touch, the kind reverence in it. She watches the Duke swallow, feeling far from them both. Only the Immanent is with her, now. Distantly, Deconniy says her name. The Duke says,  _No._ Whether he means it selfish or kind, she is grateful—to be alone on the exquisite rack, to heal and ready. And to watch, as Deconniy leans in to the Duke’s touch, the Duke’s hand sliding through his hair, as he takes the Duke in his mouth. The Immanent Power, thrumming like a stoked flame on her skin, has not forgotten her. Only waits, in its infinite willingness to break her body on its wheel, for her to rebuild into something worth breaking.

She will wake with blood in her mouth from a bitten tongue; she will not be able to sit painlessly. But she and Deconniy will understand each other better in the morning. And somewhere a very long way off she envisions the Duke saying, or the Power saying through him: _This understands you. You have a body, or a soul, meant to accommodate this_.

The buckle burns against Eöté’s fingers. She hopes it brands.

 

 

 

She awakens with the dawn, aware that she is not the only one in the room. Not only Deconniy, either: his mouth soft against her neck, his eyelids vulnerable in his untroubled sleep. She draws a fingertip along the place in his brow usually furrowed with intention. She wonders what it is like to know oneself so well, to not mind being eye to eye with your secrets.

Even the Duke, even Eänetaìsarè, did not find any secrets of his heart to turn against him from within. Unguardedness is its own punishment, she supposes.

The Duke did not share the bed for sleeping. She finds it difficult to imagine him sleeping at all. On the other side of the wall, she hears no footsteps—yet, still, she tells herself it is worthwhile to check.

Her own feet bare and chilled on the stone floor. His door cracked open, only just. She does not have to go inside. A flicker of yellow: not flame but his eyes.

Then footsteps. Then he is there, hand on the doorjamb, letting it push open. The thin drape of his nightshirt. His wolf’s eyes making inventory of scrapes she feels only as they are seen. His mouth works, subtly, and she feels his teeth on her throat.

The expression on his face is one of disgust, shame, even as she feels heat and magic pulling through the surface, an instant knowing thrum. For the first time, she sees a flickering hint, that there is a man behind the Wolf.

Still, she waits, and makes him look, makes him find the words.

“It loves you,” he says at last, almost angry. “The Power— _she_ loves you. Why?”

_Because I am kindling,_ she does not say.

And yet, she is not ash yet.

She marvels aloud to the both of them: “Only Eänetaìsarè knows the limits to my suffering.”

His inhale is as though she has drawn a knife and placed it to his throat.

“The Duke may come to my bed as he pleases,” she says, steadily. “It is his. He may find his captain there, waiting. We heal more cleanly together, you see.”

An impulse finds her reaching out, laying a hand to his cheek. She thinks, Innisth terè Maèr Eänetaì, you will not burn to ash either.

“Trust in our strength,” says Eöté, only just beginning to believe it. “None of us will be consumed.”

He nods, silent, in something like admission. She thinks of the lash-marks on his back that he will not have touched, before he closes the door.

In the morning silence, with a sense of solitude at last, she closes her eyes and feels the emptiness of a body cleansed by holy fire. Her heart and mind travel far over the snow outside, calling to the gods.  


End file.
